The official blog of the Campaign for the American Reader, an independent initiative to encourage more readers to read more books.

Friday, December 12, 2014

Ten top neo-Victorian novels

Charles Palliser's books include The Quincunx, The Unburied, and Rustication. One of his top ten neo-Victorian novels--books that "don’t merely use the 19th-century setting but exploit readers’ knowledge of the fiction of that period"--as shared at the Guardian:

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Forget about the movie. This is a masterpiece and could only work as a novel. It’s the Homeric story of a soldier trying to return to his wife and home after fighting in a war – here the American Civil War. And it’s also a moving love story which ends heartbreakingly. Like The Odyssey, it’s a series of episodes that would normally fragment a novel’s unity but each one is so powerful and mysterious and so much in tune with the dominant theme that it succeeds completely. A book that will resonate in the memory.